Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (5 page)

Two months later, Hitler inked a deal with Italy’s Fascist “Duce,” Benito Mussolini. Known as the Pact of Steel, the agreement called for cooperation in time of war, a war that seemed all that much closer because of the pact. With a name like “Pact of Steel,” it didn’t even sound like an alliance with friendly intentions.

On August 24, Hitler sent his foreign minister to Moscow. There, Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union’s own brutal strongman, Josef Stalin. Much to the surprise of the global media that demonized and caricaturized them both, the right-wing demon, Hitler, had tumbled into bed with the left-wing demon, Stalin.

A week later, on the morning of September 1, 1939, as German troops raced across the border, German bombs began falling on Poland. In London, Neville Chamberlain proposed more negotiations, but Hitler held the best hand—and he had just decreed that the time for negotiating was over.

Chamberlain consulted with Daladier, and together they came to realize that the time for negotiating was indeed over. On September 3, Britain and France declared that a state of war between them and the Third Reich had existed for two days. There would be no “peace in our time.”

Not only did the German invasion stun the world politically, the precision of the integrated German war machine stunned the world militarily. It was the most well-trained, best-equipped, and overall superior military force in the world. Their coordinated air and ground offensive, known as blitzkrieg (lightning war), was the most rapid and efficient mode of military attack the world had ever seen. The use of fast-moving tanks, mobile forces, dive bombers, and paratroop units—all working together as one tight, well-disciplined force—stunned the world, especially the Polish defenders. Germany was able to subjugate Poland in just three weeks. The Luftwaffe played such a crucial role in this action that it surprised airpower advocates and airpower skeptics alike.

After Germany had conquered Poland—naturally annexing the great port at Danzig—Britain and France dispatched a few bombers over Germany but, for the most part, took no offensive action. A lull in the action of World War II descended over Europe. Throughout the winter of 1939–1940, Allied and German troops sat and stared at one another across the heavily fortified Franco-German border. So little was happening that newspaper writers dubbed the situation the “sitzkrieg” or the “phoney war.”

On April 9, 1940, Germany attacked to the west.

Sitzkrieg became blitzkrieg once again. German troops quickly occupied Denmark and Norway. On May 10, the Germans began a great offensive to the west that duplicated their advance on Belgium and France in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. By May 28, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands had surrendered and German forces were pouring into France. By June 14, Germany had seized control of Paris, having accomplished in five weeks what it had been unable to do in four years of protracted fighting in World War I.

France finally surrendered on June 22, leaving Britain to face the onslaught of Germany’s blitzkrieg alone. Only twenty-one miles of English Channel separated Germany’s crack troops from an army that had
abandoned all of its equipment in France when it barely managed to escape from the Germans at Dunkirk on the French coast on June 4.

While Hitler’s forces prepared for a cross-channel invasion of Britain, the English people rallied around Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had taken office on May 10 telling them he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He defied Hitler by informing him that his troops would meet relentless opposition on the beaches, on the streets, and in every village. However, Luftwaffe commander Field Marshal Hermann Göring insisted that his bombers could easily subdue Britain, making the planned sea invasion a simple walk-over.

In August, the Luftwaffe began a brutal, unremitting bombing assault on Britain’s ports, factories, and cities. Soon the assault turned to the British capital, with the ruthless London Blitz.

The only thing that stood in the way of an easy victory was the courageous, but vastly outnumbered, pilots of the Royal Air Force, who met the Germans like gnats attacking crows. Despite the fact that the British had fewer than one thousand fighters to face a Luftwaffe onslaught four times as large, the RAF was able to destroy twelve bombers for each one of their own losses. Churchill called it the RAF’s “finest hour.”

The Luftwaffe had eradicated the will of the Netherlands to resist German armies by leveling downtown Rotterdam in June, but failed to do the same to the British a few months later. Nevertheless, the London Blitz stunned and nearly demoralized Britain.

In their use of integrated tactical air operations in support of the blitzkrieg, the Luftwaffe had revolutionized tactical air warfare. They had developed the right aircraft and had mastered the right tactics to achieve frighteningly successful results.

The Germans had shown the world that this war would be an
air
war.

Billy Mitchell had resigned in February 1926, and died a decade later, in February 1936, having spent the last ten years of his life predicting that the next world war would be an air war,
and
insisting that the United States should get ready for it. While there were young officers throughout the US Army and US Navy who had heard Mitchell, the upper levels of command were scarcely more willing to believe the premise of his argument than they had been in 1921.

Though his own countrymen had remained deaf to Mitchell’s message, the idea had obviously taken root in Europe, especially in Germany. While the air forces of Europe were expanding during the 1930s, there was no corresponding urgency among the upper echelon leadership of the United States armed forces to do the same. For nearly two centuries, vast oceans had been both physical and psychological barriers which insulated America from foreign wars. Even eighteen years after Billy Mitchell had proven that bombers could sink battleships, the US Navy defense planners still insisted that oceans and battleships were the only line of defense that the United States needed to avoid war. The US Army, meanwhile, still believed that its subsidiary Air Corps existed only to support troops in the
field, not to undertake offensive actions behind enemy lines independent of the ground troops.

However, within the Air Corps, Billy Mitchell’s vision for an independent air force capable of decisive action had resonated with many junior officers since the 1920s. By the 1930s, these men were no longer
junior
officers. One of the leading voices of airpower advocacy within the Air Corps was the officer who became its chief in 1938—General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, West Point class of 1907.

Until the early 1930s, the types of aircraft that were being acquired by the Air Corps were principally single-engine trainers and combat aircraft. By the late 1930s, more and more longer range “multi-engine” warplanes were being added to the mix by forward-thinking officers who were rising in the ranks, graduating from bars to oak leaves.

The development of the technology for such aircraft began in 1933, with two secret Air Corps programs that were called Project A and Project D. With this, the seeds of the strategic airpower doctrine, sewn by Billy Mitchell, were germinated. The two secret projects were the first whisper of a breeze in the winds of change blowing into airpower doctrine. The idea in both projects was to examine the feasibility of very large, very long-range bombers.

These projects were significant in that they were conceived as harbingers of aircraft that would be part of a strategic doctrine. Though the United States was being outproduced elsewhere in the world, especially in Germany and the United Kingdom, when it came to combat aircraft, at least the Air Corps was
looking
ahead in conceptualizing strategic airpower.

Project A and Project D spawned a series of very large aircraft designs, of which the Boeing XB-15 and Douglas XB-19 became one-of-a-kind prototypes. However, the real value of the projects came in the manufacturers, especially Boeing, having developed the technology base for large bombers. This led to the Boeing Model 299.

Designed by a team of brilliant young engineers, notably Edward Curtis Wells, and built at company expense, the Boeing Model 299 first flew on July 28, 1935. At the rollout,
Seattle Times
reporter Richard
Williams described the huge, four-engine bomber as a “flying fortress.” The name was adopted as the official name. In January 1936, after several months of testing, the Air Corps ordered the first Flying Fortresses under the designation Y1B-17, and by 1938, they were ordering small numbers of operational B-17Bs.

During 1939, as Europe went to war, the Luftwaffe took delivery of 8,295 new aircraft, and Britain’s Royal Air Force acquired 7,940. The US Army Air Corps bought 2,141, mainly trainers. In August, they had ordered 38 B-17C Flying Fortresses for delivery in 1940.

In July 1940, with the German armies in control of most of Western Europe, and England seeming to be ripe for the picking, the United States government and military services were faced with the problem of expanding the army and the Navy, and the air services of both. Nevertheless, the acquisition of four-engine bombers still moved at a timid pace. In 1940, the Air Corps would order just 80 B-17C and B-17D aircraft. Among these, 20 were acquired for Britain’s Royal Air Force in the autumn of 1940 under the designation Fortress Mk.I.

The latter is illustrative of how the world viewed four-engine bomber development, and how planners in England had failed to embrace the doctrine of strategic airpower. Even one year into World War II, the Flying Fortress was the only operational four-engine bomber of which significant numbers were in the pipeline.

By this time, the RAF had awakened and the British Air Ministry had ordered the development of aircraft such as the Short Stirling and the Handley Page Halifax, but their operational careers would not be under way until 1941. The Avro Lancaster, considered Britain’s best strategic bomber of the war, would not be in service until 1942.

Meanwhile, a second American four-engine bomber type was coming on line in 1941. Developed by Consolidated Aircraft of San Diego as its Model 32, the aircraft was designated as the B-24 by the Air Corps, and named Liberator. As with the Flying Fortress, some early Liberators were delivered to the RAF in 1941. The first mass-production variant, the B-24D, would make its squadron service debut in the United States the following year.

For all their meticulous planning in terms of aircraft and tactics—not
to mention their superior numbers of first-rate aircraft—the Luftwaffe had yet to seriously consider four-engine strategic bombers. Those four-engine aircraft the Germans had developed, such as the Fw 200, were long on range but short on combat durability and payload.

The Luftwaffe had proven itself as an undisputed master of tactical air warfare, but they had failed to develop either the long-range aircraft, or a long-rang plan, for
strategic
air warfare. Meanwhile, the US Army Air Corps had taken a significant step toward developing the aircraft. Soon it would take a step toward developing a plan.

In June 1941, big changes came to the US Army’s conception of airpower. In a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier, Chief of Staff General George Marshall ordered the creation of an autonomous US Army Air Forces as the operational successor to the Air Corps.

General Arnold, as the commander of the new USAAF, formed an Air Staff and named General Carl Spaatz as its chief. He charged Spaatz, who had already spent time working with the British Air Staff in London, with creating an Air War Plans Division (AWPD). This organization would coordinate with the US Army’s existing War Plans Division (WPD) but would remain independent from it. Headed by Lieutenant Colonel Harold L. “Hal” George, the AWPD came into being in July 1941 and began developing the plan that would be implemented if, or
when
, the United States became involved in World War II. This plan, known as AWPD-1, would be integrated into the larger joint US Army–US Navy contingency plan known as Rainbow 5.

The cast of young officers who came together around AWPD-1, as part of Hal George’s staff, not only helped draft the plan, but many would go on to play key roles in its implementation. They included Lieutenant Colonel Orvil Anderson, Major Hoyt Vandenberg, and a World War I flight instructor turned businessman, Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Moss, as well as a pair of West Pointers, Major Laurence Kuter and Major Haywood Hansell. Hansell would go on to command the first B-17 combat wing in Europe, while Vandenberg would command the wartime Ninth Air Force, and go on to serve as chief of staff of the postwar US Air Force.

Ground had yet to be broken for the Pentagon, so these men, among
the best and the brightest in the USAAF, rolled up their sleeves and went to work in the Munitions Building on the Washington Mall.

Officially entitled
Munitions Requirements of the Army Air Forces to Defeat Our Potential Enemies
, AWPD-1 went beyond determining aircraft production goals and developed the comprehensive outlines for a strategy of deploying them to win the war. As Robert Futrell writes in his book,
Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine
, President Roosevelt himself heartily agreed that the mission of the AWPD was to draft the “requirements required to defeat our potential enemies.”

Completed early in August, AWPD-1 included a strategy for fighting a war not just in Europe, but around the world, from the Western Hemisphere to the Western Pacific. Subsequent AWPD planning, such as AWPD-2 in September 1941, which considered aircraft production, would be based on the general outlines of AWPD-1.

Though Hal George and his team were looking ahead, nobody realized how soon the anticipated American entry into World War II would come.

By the end of November 1941, as an Imperial Japanese Navy carrier group was closing in on the Hawaiian Islands, the USAAF had 3,305 combat aircraft in its inventory. Of these, 145 were Flying Fortresses, and only 11 were Liberators.